How to build an analytics dashboard to measure your video's success

Strategy is more than just executing a smart gameplan, it's also about measurement and optimization. Today I'm going to break down a small internal sales project at Animus and show how we designed a dashboard using Medialytics to keep the team informed.

This simple tool gives us instant insight into whether or not we were acheving our goals and ultimately helps inform how we produce similar projects.

The Mission

We work with a large healthcare brand at the national level, but they have franchisees that could benefit greatly from video content we’ve already created and some custom production.

We built a simple monthly pricing structure around this idea and set up one-on-one meetings during a company-wide meeting. In order to get buy-in then, we knew we needed to clearly explain the concept in advance, show off our previous work for the brand, and get the franchise owners excited about partnership.

The Approach

We knew a video would be the easiest way to connect with our audience and build an emotional connection, but we also needed to pair that with straightforward copy that explained the details of the pitch.

So, we needed a landing page and a solid email to get people there.

Building the creative

I’ve been working on simple web templates in Adobe Muse for landing pages and special projects. Muse is basically photoshop for website creation and allows you to create amazing, responsive (!) websites quickly.

I pulled from an existing template, and had a draft put together in under an hour. I integrated it with copy from our sales team, and placed a video that we filmed in our internal studio.

We went from concept to final product in less than a day.

Sharing our content

We use Wistia anytime we put content on the web. They’re the best business-centric video host out there, and make it super easy to generate email friendly thumbnails.

We uploaded the video and used the customization tools to make it fit seamlessly into our design. We also set it up to autoplay on load since folks would be coming here directly after clicking a thumbnail.

We also included some reference videos on the landing page, we used Wistia’s popover embed to keep the site design streamlined.

We used Mailchimp to send out the blast to our list of franchisees.

Measuring success

Wistia has amazing built in analytics tools, but we use Medialytics to make the most of all this data. With Medialytics, we can do things beyond the native analytics tools and build customized dashboards that feature tools like segmentation and timeboxing.

For this project, our dashboard was simple. We cared about overall engagement, engagement with each reference video, and we wanted to know which franchises had visited the page.

We used segmentation based on city to measure our reach, and timeboxed all of our metrics so we didn’t include our internal views of the content pre-launch.

What went well and what we can do better

We reached over 50 franchises and our engagement rates were high, around 75%. This was impressive given the short time span we had between our email blast and our meetings. We put this together short notice, publishing on Friday afternoon with the internal conference starting Monday morning.

We knew this project would be a valuable internal tool to test our workflow for rapid response sales projects, but we were surprised that it was so successful given the compressed timeline. It proved our assumption that video can be a powerful and easy to consume internal tool for sales, and that we can put together a relatively sophisticated landing page quickly.

That being said, the compressed timeline could have been avoided and if we had more time we could have built a more successful landing page that could’ve actually led to (trackable) conversions instead of just increased awareness. This additional time would’ve allowed us to spend more time refining the design and copy as well, increasing our chances for success.

Overall, this was a successful low risk experiment and we’ll be doing a lot more as we build and refine our content marketing workflows. In the future, we'll apply similar approaches to build holistic inbound marketing campaigns based around video.

Applying this to your project

When you build your dashboard, the first thing to do is think about KPIs, key performance indicators. What metrics matter to your project? What kind of data correlates to success?

Here's a quick cheat sheet for common video marketing KPIs:

Plays

How many people does your video reach? This can show whether or not you delivered content successfully to your audience. This is a helpful metric to identify problems with your delivery method, but is just the start when thinking about the effectiveness of the video itself.

Play rate

Every time your video loads, how many people clicked play? Higher play rates indicate relevance. Factors like the copy around the video and the thumbnail have a big effect on whether people press play.

Engagement

How long did people watch? This is an important one. Engagement can show how effective your content was at holding someone's attention. You can also identify specific parts of the video where people lost interest, or an area that people are re-watching a lot.

Conversions

Did people take the next step I wanted them to? In many sales campaigns, this is the primary KPI because this directly measures how effective your video was in moving people down the funnel. In Medialytics you can measure email collection in Wistia content or subscriptions on YouTube.

Once you have a good handle on your goals and the KPIs you need to measure them, you can start setting up your own dashboard to track your progress. Think about using features like segmentation or timeboxing to drill deep into specific metrics in addition to displaying numbers that show a high level view of how your content is performing.

Dashboards are a perfect tool to get comfortable using video analytics. They take a platform's native metrics tools and supercharge them with extra features and integrations to deliver exactly the information you need. Medialytics is a free tool (for now), so it's a great place to experiment with and I definitely encourage you to try it out for your next project.